Charles Gounod Faust - Metropolitan Opera

Program Note
The legendary German poet, playwright, novelist, and scientist Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe first began working on his epic drama Faust as
early as 1772, when he was just 23 years old and a recent graduate of law
school. He could not have known then that his toil on the project would occupy
him for the rest of his life, stretching to enormous proportions and not reaching
its completion until the year of his death six decades later. What he did know,
however, was that he wanted to eventually see Faust set to music. Goethe was
clearly a man of good taste in this regard, as he approached Mozart to suggest
a collaboration in the early stages of his writing. Sadly, by the time Goethe finally
managed to complete Part I around 1806, Mozart—despite being seven years
Goethe’s junior—was 15 years in the grave. And when the finishing touches were
put to Part II in 1832, music itself had changed tremendously. Beethoven had
come and gone, turning the world on its ear and ushering in Romanticism in the
20 short, stormy years between the “Eroica” (1804) and the Ninth Symphony
(1824). Despite his dream of having his work turned into an opera, Goethe
had no faith in the young Romantics, declaring that—regardless of his death—
Mozart was still the only composer worthy of setting Faust to music.
Ironically, the Romantics felt entirely the opposite about Goethe. He became
the most important poetic touchstone for 19th-century German composers,
inspiring countless works by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Liszt, Schumann,
Wolf, and many others. Faust, though, remained intimidating. Goethe’s
ultimate masterpiece stretches to several hundred pages of text, depending
on the edition, and concerns itself with a dizzying array of profound topics:
philosophy, mythology, theology, temptation, desire, love, human nature, the
quest for knowledge, the meaning of life, and the mystery of the afterlife. To
make matters worse, there was also the issue of Mozart’s shadow. As Schumann
wrote to Mendelssohn while planning his oratorio Szenen aus Goethes Faust,
any composer hoping to set Faust “would not only be judged by his treatment
of one of the seminal and most widely acclaimed works in German literature,
but would also be setting himself up to be compared to Mozart.” Perhaps it is
not surprising, then, that the most enduringly popular musical work based on
Faust was written by a Frenchman, takes as its starting point a loose Frenchlanguage
adaptation of the text, and makes no attempt to match the scope and
profundity of the original drama.
Charles Gounod began work on his Faust in 1856. At the time, he was not a
prominent opera composer; his modest reputation rested mainly on his body of
religious music and his having won the Prix de Rome in 1839. He had completed
two previous operas, Sapho and La Nonne Sanglante—both of which were
produced at the Académie Impériale de Musique (more commonly known as
the Paris Opera)—but both were failures. Determined to have a hit, he came
up with a new idea: an opera on Goethe’s Faust. It was rejected. The Opera’s
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